It is the common practice to manufacture solid dosage forms in which the ingredients, i.e., active agents, excipients, etc. are compacted into various shapes such as tablets, briquettes, pellets and the like. Because of its excellent compression properties, a preferred excipient is microcrystalline cellulose (MCC). Compacted solid dosage forms made with MCC are durable and stable yet readily disintegrate when added to an aqueous medium with concomitant release of active components.
MCC, however, is a relatively expensive excipient. Consequently, its application in compression molding formulation has been confined largely to high cost items such as pharmaceutical tablets. It has not, for instance, proved economically feasible to utilize MCC in preparing solid dosage forms of agricultural chemicals, e.g., insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc. which are considerably lower per unit price than pharmaceuticals.
According to U.S. Pat. No. 4,744,987 issued to Mehra et al, a coprocessed blend of MCC and calcium carbonate is similar in its compression molding characteristics to MCC along only less expensive. The product was developed for preparing pharmaceutical solid dosage forms.